It’s been a week since AMD (Paper) launched its next generation HD7970 graphic card featuring the 28nm Tahiti XT chip. Now Engineers at ASUS have got a sample of the reference HD7970 and some LN2 to test the overclocking potential of AMD’s next flagship graphic card.

World Renowned Overclockers Shamino and Andre Yang also accompanied the ASUS team. The team took a single reference HD7970 GPU and with the use of some Liquid Nitrogen took the card beyond its limits. They achieved a stock core clock of 1650Mhz on the Core alone and 1700Mhz on the Memory which is mindblowing.

The GPU was tested with 3DMark 11 in which it scored 14031 Points (Graphics Score) at 1650/1700 MHz. The testing didn’t end here as the team decided to pump up the memory clock a bit more to 1800Mhz which resulted in another 200 Point score increase – 14255(Graphics Score) at 1650/1800 MHz.

The team also mentioned that they can expect a total score of 16000 Points in 3DMark 11 considering the test setup included a Core i7 3960X Processors and an ASUS Rampage IV Extreme Motherboard. CPU/Physics Score were kept off during the benchmark. A Geforce GTX580 with the same setup acquired a total score of 13144 Points.

Also do keep this in mind that a reference version of the HD7970 has achieved 1650Mhz Core clock, A Non-Reference Model from different vendors such as ASUS Matrix/Direct CUII and MSI’s Lightning Edition cards which come stuffed with tougher Power Phases can result in a 2000Mhz+ Overclock.

The AMD HD7970 ($549) and HD7950 ($449) Officially launch on 9th January 2012.